Single source publishing

Single source publishing, also known as single sourcing publishing, is a content management method which allows the same source content to be used across different forms of media and more than one time. The labour-intensive and expensive work of editing need only be carried out once, on only one document; that source document can then be stored in one place and reused. This reduces the potential for error, as corrections are only made one time in the source document.

The benefits of single source publishing primarily relate to the editor rather than the user. The user does benefit from consistent terminology and information, but this consistency is also a potential weakness of single source publishing if the content manager does not have an organized conceptualization. Single-source publishing is sometimes used synonymously with multi-channel publishing though whether or not the two terms are synonymous is a matter of discussion.

While there is a general definition of single source publishing, there is no single official delineation between single source publishing and multi-channel publishing, nor are there any official governing bodies to provide such a delinieation. Single source publishing is most often understood as the creation of one source document in Microsoft Word or Adobe FrameMaker and converting that document into different file formats or human languages (or both) multiple times with minimal effort. Multi-channel publishing can either be seen as synonymous with single source publishing, or similar in that there is one source document but the process itself results in more than a mere reproduction of that source.

The origins of single-source publishing lie, indirectly, with the release of Windows 3.0 in 1990. With the eclipsing of MS-DOS by graphical user interfaces, help files went from being unreadable text along the bottom of the screen to hypertext systems such as WinHelp. On-screen help interfaces allowed software companies to cease the printing of large, expensive help manuals with their products, reducing costs for both producer and consumer. This system raised opportunities as well, and many developers fundamentally changed the way they thought about publishing. Writers of software documentation did not simply move from being writers of traditional bound books to writers of electronic publishing, but rather they became authors of central documents which could be reused multiple times across multiple formats.

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Wikipedia